Mystery plant at Achmelvich
On 2nd March 2023 David Haines emailed me a couple of photographs he had come across whilst trawling through ones taken the previous summer. They were close-ups of the fruiting head of a plant he had spotted on the restored part of the machair at Achmelvich (NC0524) on 29th June (photo 1).
The fruits were quite tightly packed, fanning out around the centre of a disc. They were in a way reminiscent of members of the daisy/dandelion family (Asteraceae, formerly Compositae). The fruits of this family often have a feathery pappus on ‘spokes’ radiating from their distal ends, as with dandelion ‘clocks’. In this case, however, the fruits bore single long styles covered in feathery hairs; they also had a pale rib down the middle and densely hairy sides (photo 2).
I was baffled and sent the photos off to a fellow botanical recorder in East Anglia. He came back with the very reasonable suggestion of mountain avens Dryas octopetala, a member of the rose family. Whose fruits are of the right general form. We do have lots of this plant on the limestone around Inchnadamph. There are old records from the 1950s for both NC02 (which includes Achmelvich) and NC12 (east of Lochinver), where it has never been seen since.
Mystery solved
However, the fruits did not look quite right for mountain avens. The penny finally dropped after a conversation with Andy Summers. He reminded me that on 9th May 2018 he had seen and photographed, in about the same area, a southern species called pasqueflower Pulsatilla vulgaris (photos 3-5). Its flowers are a lovely violet-purple and conspicuous; its fruits are another matter.
This member of the buttercup family occurs sparingly in the wild on chalk and limestone in England, up to south Yorkshire. However, it is grown in gardens and seed is readily available. Presumably a visitor to Achmelvich thought that the flora of the machair required augmenting. I heard about it at the time, but must have thought it unlikely to survive. As a result I did not record its presence – a mistake.
It appears to be surviving on the shell-enriched sandy soils of the machair. Coincidently, it’s not far from a small group of cowslips, probably also introduced, though over thirty years ago. Cowslips do occur in the wild on the north coast, but pasqueflower is a long way from home.
Ian M. Evans
[a short follow up article can be read here]